Tim Barribeau

It's one of the great canards of fretting over the youth — they're drinking too much soda and abandoning the homey goodness of milk. Well, it turns out that kids are drinking more sugary drinks, but it's not linked to a decline in drinks that aren't horrible for them.

According to data analysed from surveying thousands of children from 5th to 8th grade, kids are drinking more sugary drinks on the whole, and consuming less of milk and 100% juice, but the two aren't connected. In fact, once they corrected for variables associated with demographic and nutrition characteristics, they found that "changes in children's milk consumption were not significantly related to changes in their consumption of sweetened beverages over time."

The one link they did find was that kids cut back or increased both milk and juice in tandem. Kids who began to drink less milk also drank less juice, and likewise for drinking less. Right, so what other boogeyman can we blame the ills of today's youth on? Is prescription drug abuse still a thing?